


Caged Birds Freed

by RagingLamb



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Harry Potter Gets a Hug, Harry Potter Needs a Hug, Luna Lovegood is a Good Friend, Mentioned Albus Dumbledore, Mentioned Cedric Diggory - Freeform, Mentioned Hermione Granger, Sirius Black Gets a Trial, Sirius Black Lives, Wizarding Politics (Harry Potter)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:01:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28342068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RagingLamb/pseuds/RagingLamb
Summary: When Harry is expelled and has his wand snapped, Luna invites him to stay with her while her dad is away on a year long business trip. Harry takes up the invitation and finds that Luna is everything he could hope to have during these trying times.
Relationships: Luna Lovegood & Harry Potter
Comments: 2
Kudos: 62





	Caged Birds Freed

When the invitation came, Harry didn’t respond right away. It sat on his dresser for several days before he brought the matter to Sirius, who was the person who would be most effected after Harry. He thought he just didn’t want to leave Sirius alone in dank and dusty Grimmauld Place.

But Sirius was adamant, from the moment the words escaped his mouth, that Harry should take up the offer and stay with Luna, at least for a while. He had sent his closest friends away, had sent the whole Order out and Dumbledore along with them. He’d barely spoken at all since the trial. Barely slept or ate either.

Of course, Sirius was worried about him. He said it was like he was living with a potted plant.

And of course, Harry couldn’t stand to worry Sirius.

So, he took up the invitation, and a week later, when school began, Harry did not get on the Hogwarts Express and he did not stay holed up in what was once Regulus’ room in Grimmauld Place. Instead, he took the portkey that Xenophilius and Luna had sent him and appeared in the garden of a house shaped like a rook with his trunk at his side.

Xenophilius helped him bring in his trunk and gave his condolences for the outcome of his trial before kissing Luna on her forehead and apparating out of the house to begin his business trip for the Quibbler.

The inside of the house, including the guest room he was set up in, was very homey and felt like the kind of cottage one would find in a muggle fairy tale. Harry had never been in a house quite like it and he found that he liked it very much.

=====================================================================================

The trial had gone very badly indeed.

He’d pleaded his case, desperate to avoid being expelled, to avoid the same fate that Hagrid had been punished with all those years ago.

But it didn’t do him any good.

He wasn’t in any danger, they said. Just his cousin, his cousin who couldn’t even see the enemy accosting him, coming to steal his very soul. He needn’t have bothered trying to save one muggle boy when there was a sliver of a chance that an uninformed muggle might witness the magical rescue attempt.

Harry burned under their cold stares. He shrank into the wood of his chair.

They came to a decision.

He was to be expelled from Hogwarts. And his wand was to be snapped.

Undersecretary Umbridge had taken great pleasure in snapping his wand.

=====================================================================================

Luna didn’t ask about the trial or try outright to make him feel better. She let him be quietly sad when the feeling came over him, though she didn’t leave him to wallow either. She’d come into whatever room he was in to open the windows, letting the scent of the flowers and herbs in the garden fill up the space, and serve him a cup of tea.

Harry felt better than he had in weeks after just a few days with Luna and he found himself talking about the trial all on his own one day when they were weeding the garden beds.

“I just . . . I feel like they’re punishing me for coming forward about Voldemort, like they were just waiting for their chance to get me and that was it. Saving myself and my awful cousin was their chance.”

“Probably,” Luna replied in her gentle way.

“And I think I miss being able to do magic more than I miss being at Hogwarts. It’s like I was robbed of this . . . this . . . part of me!”

Luna turned to him and took his dirty hand in her own, “You can still do magic Harry.”

“How am I supposed to do magic without a wand? I don’t even have the pieces!” He shouted, frustrated, digging his fingers into the dirt.

“The way we all do, Harry,” she said, smiling at him, “The way every witch and wizard does when they’re young.”

“Like—like accidental magic?”

Luna beamed, “Exactly, except controlled. On purpose.”

=====================================================================================

They started at the beginning, with making light and turning matches into needles. For days there was no progress, or there seemed to be no progress, and Harry grew frustrated. He wanted to quit, wanted to scream that it was impossible for a fifteen-year-old Hogwarts dropout to master wandless magic.

But Luna was there to make him tea and soothe him with her soft smiles as she guided him through it. And she made it look easy as breathing. So, he kept going even when he hated it.

And eventually, he made light and turned matches into needles.

When he finally did his first bit of magic (making a match ever so slightly silver and pointed), he scooped Luna up into his arms and held her tight.

“I knew you could do it, Harry,” she muffled into his unruly hair, and though Harry couldn’t see it, she was smiling.

Over the course of weeks which turned into months, Harry slowly, painstakingly relearned everything from first year on up with Luna as a steady guiding hand all the way.

=====================================================================================

Between lessons and tea, Harry also talked about Cedric in starts and stops and gasped out words. He told Luna about the love that had blossomed over the course of a year and how it hurt to have it so ruthlessly crushed.

He talked about how Cedric’s smile had made his heart leap. How Cedric’s eyes twinkled with mischief when he’s suggested Harry take a nice bath in the prefect bathroom. He talked about how handsome Cedric had been in his dress robes at the Yule Ball and how much he’d wanted to kiss him.

He talked about the graveyard. About a pale, shriveled thing ordering the callous execution of the boy he’d grown to love. He spent hours sobbing through the entire twisted tale while Luna rubbed his back and let him tell it.

=====================================================================================

“So, why do we use wands if we don’t really need them?” Harry asked one day while they worked together to wandlessly cast the patronus charm. The charm was eluding Harry, he wasn’t able to cast the full charm anymore it seemed, just a thick silvery mist.

“It’s simple really,” Luna said, silver whisps dancing around her, “When they snapped your wand, you thought you’d never be able to do magic again.”

“What do you—” Then it clicked, “The ministry wants to control who can do magic.”

=====================================================================================

Harry knew what was going on back at Hogwarts, he wrote to Ron and Hermione, Neville and the twins. He knew that Umbridge was every bit as power hungry and authoritarian as she’d been at his trial, perhaps even more.

When the pictures came, of words dug into flesh, Harry passed them along to Luna who passed them on to Xenophilius through the mail. When the next Quibbler came out, Umbridge was ruined. Parents were calling not just for her termination, but her arrest.

She was quickly fired from Hogwarts, then from her position in the ministry.

The minister himself overturned Harry’s original sentence and extended an invitation to return to Hogwarts, but Harry remembered.

He remembered the crack of his wand snapping in cruel hands, a puff of phoenix fire rising from the broken shaft of the feather core. He remembered how Dumbledore had been so passive at his trial. He remembered years of Dumbledore and the ministry doing such a poor job of protecting him, of protecting his interests.

Harry took the shiny new wand that he wasn’t going to use and the restitution money. He also pressed for Sirius to be given a trial (which did, in fact, prove him innocent). But he didn’t go back to Hogwarts.

Xenophilius came back for a week to work on the wards so mail from Dumbledore and most of the Order couldn’t come through. Then he was off again, doing whatever he did on his business trips. Drugs, Harry thought.

Dumbledore and McGonagall had sent so many letters pleading with him to come back. Hermione had even sent a couple, but she conceded that, perhaps, Hogwarts wasn’t the best environment for Harry to learn in, especially after Harry told her that he’d advanced through fifth year course work with work that was much higher quality that anything he’d turned in at Hogwarts.

The Prophet ran article after article about how the Boy Who Lived was refusing to return to Hogwarts and speculating about why that might be.

The real surprise came in the form of a Dark Lord appearing on the doorstep one sunny winter afternoon when Luna and Harry were practicing cleaning spells in the kitchen.

There’d been a short knock on the door and there he’d been in all of his snake-faced glory. He wanted Harry to join him.

He assumed that because Harry refused Dumbledore’s _gracious_ offer to return to Hogwarts, he must be completely uninterested in getting rid of Voldemort.

Harry kindly rejected his offer by sending the man flying across the yard and through the garden fence without saying a word. He pulled out every juvenile, relatively harmless jinx and charm he knew to thoroughly humiliate and otherwise occupy the Dark Lord while Luna floo-called Sirius who in turn floo-called Amelia Bones to alert her to the situation.

By the time Amelia Bones arrived on the scene with an army of aurors, Voldemort had been jelly-legged, tripped, and bat-bogeyed into submission. He was still vomiting slugs when they handcuffed him.

Sirius was quite proud.

=====================================================================================

After Voldemort was taken into custody and Kissed, Harry and Luna returned to their studies. And Harry was finally able to cast his full patronus again, a brilliant silver stag bursting from his fingertips.

What did he think of to project that expression of his soul?

Just a girl with blonde hair, holding his hand in the garden and telling him it was possible.

=====================================================================================

It took time for Harry to make change, but Harry was remarkably patient, especially with Luna at his side.

He sat his OWLs and his NEWTs with Luna following right behind. They helped Xenophilius with the Quibbler, writing about the legislation passing through the Wizengamot any given week. They worked in the garden and traveled to observe and document magical flora and fauna when they could.

And when Harry was old enough he claimed his lordships and his seats in the Wizengamot and then he and Luna played the ministry’s game. He threw all his considerable political weight behind the more innocuous bills that lead in the general direction of where he wanted to steer the wizarding world.

He was the Boy Who Lived, after all, and more than that he was the boy who had defeated Voldemort on his own a second time.

Eventually, Harry’s patience was rewarded.

He was middle-aged by then, still living with Luna even all those years later. Still working on the Quibbler and the garden and finding the Crumple-Horned Snorkack.

But finally, the bill he’d been waiting to propose was ready to be accepted by the wizarding world. The bill was simple enough, but it was the most daring step forward, and perhaps the hardest one, yet.

It was a bill that would require the teaching of wandless magic in the third year of schooling.

It passed . . . unanimously.

And Harry felt the shackles on the British wizarding community loosen.

He swept Luna up in his arms and twirled her joyously once they flooed back into their home. They had done it, after years and years of playing politics, they’d done it. They’d managed to get the wizarding world, the ministry to put power back into the hands of ordinary witches and wizards.


End file.
